le,
and would reform without more ado,--and thus it is with you in all your
public repentances. But alas! you know not yourselves, it is still within
you which will yet corrupt you, and it was within us that hath undone us,
we were too confident of ourselves, and it is no wonder that the Lord
suffers us to prove ourselves, that we may know what is in our heart. Now,
therefore, since ye have so often tried it, I beseech you follow not such
a way again. Ye are called to deny yourselves, and to follow Christ and
this is a great part of it, that ye may never expect for any good within
yourselves, or the helping of any evil. "In me is thy help found." Look to
the fountain of life, Jesus Christ, and despair of your own hearts, for
they are desperately wicked, so wicked, that if ye knew them, ye would
despair of them, and give them over to another hand, who can create a new
heart within you. Ye use to impute your backslidings to the times, to
temptations, to company, and such like. This is the way that men shift the
challenges of sin: the drunkard puts it on his companion, the servant on
his master that led him wrong, the people put rulers in the fault, and
absolve themselves, and rulers put one another in the wrong, and absolve
themselves. But, alas! all of us are ignorant of ourselves; it is not
times nor temptations that corrupt us, but ourselves. No man is tempted,
saith James, of God, "but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of
his own lust and enticed," James i. 14. Temptation were no temptation, if
our hearts were not wicked hearts. Nay, many of us are ready to tempt
temptations, to provoke the devil to temptations; we cast ourselves open
to temptations. Temptations find lust within, and lust within is the
mother to conceive sin, if temptation be the father. Times do not bring
evils along with them, they do but discover what was hid before. All the
evils and corruptions you now see among us, where were they in the day of
our first love, when we were as a loving and beloved child? Have all these
risen up of late? No certainly, all that you have seen and found were
before, though they did not appear; before they were in the root, now you
see the fruit. All the apostacy and profanity that hath been vented in
these days, was all shut up within the corners of men's hearts at the
beginning. Time and temptation hath but uncovered the heart, and made the
inside out, hath but opened a sluice to let out this sea of corruption